Commentary: Me worry? Absolutely

Edge.org is a website where really smart people write about subjects that make most people’s heads hurt.

I check it out whenever I need to feel particularly stupid.

Each year, John Brockman, the literary agent who runs the Edge Foundation, invites a group of ridiculously brilliant people to write essays about a single subject, usually a scientific one. This year’s subject was suggested by the technology historian George Dyson: “What should we be worried about?”

Dyson’s premise: “(P)eople tend to worry too much about things that it doesn’t do any good to worry about, and not to worry enough about things we should be worrying about.”

This sounded good to me. My hobbies include worrying, moping and brooding. I spend way too much time obsessing about grizzly bear attacks. I figured the Edge.org piece could help me spend my leisure hours more effectively.

I figured wrong. Some 150 really smart people contributed things to worry about. Their essays ran to 168 printed pages. I got through maybe 50 of them before going catatonic.

One guy, John Tooby of the University of California-Santa Barbara, threw out an entire list: Gamma ray bursts of the type that occur from time to time in parts of the universe, wiping out any possibility of life. Impacts with supernovae or asteroids like those that hit Jupiter a couple of times a year. Super volcanic eruptions. “Coronal mass ejections” (super sunspots, I think) that not only destroy all electro-magnetic-based technology but the power grids necessary to repair it. A reversion by the sun to the normal instability found in G-type stars.

Tooby also warned about scientists who can’t support their hypotheses. He quoted the great physicist Richard Feynman, “Science is the belief in the ignorance of experts.”

The most ominous thing I read, and one I plan to focus my worries on, came from Seirian Sumner of England’s University of Bristol: synthetic biology.

“We are a stone’s throw away from re-creating extinct organisms,” Ms. Sumner writes. “The woolly mammoth genome was sequenced in 2008, and Japanese researchers are reputedly cloning it now, using extant elephant relatives as surrogate mothers.”

Did they not show “Jurassic Park” in Japan?

“There are already attempts to re-create ancient ecosystems through the re-introduction of the descendants of extinct megafauna (e.g. Pleistocene Park in Russia), and synthetic woolly mammoths may complete the set,” she reports.

I looked up Pleistocene Park, which is real and located in Siberia. Efforts there are under way to re-create an entire Pleistocene-era ecosystem, including cave bears.

A cave bear is, for all intents and purposes, a Pleistocene grizzly bear. Wonderful. The Russians are developing an ecosystem that might accommodate roving herds of grizzly bears, which could easily swim the Bering Strait, bypass Sarah Palin’s house, catch the Alaska Highway and be at my house in two or three weeks, tops.